Member-only story
The Old Testament Pool Player
You never know what it will take to move you closer to God
All of us tell stories, even if we don’t think of ourselves as storytellers. And the plots of the stories we tell are about anything and everything: how we found God, lost our virginity, or why the fender bender was the other guy’s fault.
Most of the stories we tell are our own, but not all of them. Some of the stories we tell are other people’s.
If you’ve ever told a fairy tale, retold a parable, or repeated something cool that happened to a friend of yours, you’ve told someone else’s story.
This is not plagiarism. All it means is that something in you resonated with a tale you heard from somebody else and were moved to pass it on, which is precisely what rabbis, priests and wisdom teachers have done since the beginning of time.
The story that follows is not my story. It’s my father’s – a man who was a passionate storyteller, so taken with his own narratives that it wasn’t uncommon for him to tell me the same story 20 times or more.
